Chinese rally racers visit Ridgecrest for race

Saturday

May 3, 2014 at 4:00 AMMay 3, 2014 at 4:16 AM

By Mike BodineSTAFF WRITERmbodine@ridgecrestca.com

A pair of Chinese nationals are in Ridgecrest for the start of the California Rally Series (CRS) Championship season that starts Saturday, May 3, with the High Desert Trails Rally. Riu Huang and Hung Bin Duan of China had their cars at the SpringHill Suites being readied by the European Rally and Performance Driving School from Hampton, Florida. This is the first desert rally race for the two, but they had competed in the Sand Blaster Race in South Carolina earlier this year. They have been testing their cars and driving in the Anza-Borrego area for the last couple of days before coming to the desert. Huang said rally racing in China is popular and he had raced there from 1996 to 2002. He said he took some time away from the tracks for business reasons, but got back behind the wheel in 2009. His new Mitsubishi Evolution 10 has been fitted with more power and he’s still learning the feel of the car and the new performance. Duan is driving a Subaru Impreza.“I will try and do my best,” Huang said. Huang and Duan almost missed the race and a chance to compete in the series, said Ivor Wigham, CEO and founder of the school. He said the two had been trying to get their foot in the door to a rally series in the States. The two racers commute from Bejing and tried to get into a rally series on the East Coast with the Sand Blaster. But he drivers had a hard time getting to other side of the country and the Pacific Ocean to that series. Luckily, the High Desert Series is on the West Coast exclusively, and the racers got in. The 127-mile stage race winds through the Jawbone Valley and Piute Mountain area, from the valley floor at 1,800 feet elevation to more than 7,000 feet in the pine-covered mountains. According to Erik Christiansen on the rally’s website, californiarallyseries.com, “The rally concludes with a 15-mile ‘power stage’ where competitors reverse order in a final sprint for prizes.” The rally includes an Open Class, Performance-Stock Class with 10 teams competing altogether. Following the local race, the teams head to Seattle and then to Boise, Idaho, for more rally fun. The High Desert Trails Rally started making dust around the Indian Wells Valley in 1973. The race organizers explained what rally racing is all about: “The High Desert Trails Rally is a performance time trial event. Rally racing is a motorsport where a driver and navigator (co-driver) race down closed dirt roads, one car at a time, as fast as they can. The cars race against the clock, and not head-to-head. The racing sections are called Special Stages and closed to all non-rally traffic. The vehicles stay on the road and do not go ‘off-road’ into the desert. When not racing on the closed stages, the cars transit with normal traffic.”For more information on the High Desert Trails Rally, visit http://highdeserttrails.com. There are spectator opportunities on Saturday afternoon and a rallycross on Sunday near the south end of the Desert Empire Fairgrounds. The DEF is renting the space out to the rally.